Black Holes

International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) via ScienceDaily: Scientists have discovered a hungry black hole swallowing a star at the centre of a nearby galaxy. The supermassive black hole was found…

Royal Astronomical Society via ScienceDaily: The central supermassive black hole of a recently discovered galaxy has been found to be far larger than should be possible, according to current theories of galactic…

Autonomous University of Barcelona via ScienceDaily: “Wormholes” are cosmic tunnels that can connect two distant regions of the universe, and have been popularized by the dissemination of theoretical physics and by works…

via ScienceDaily: Scientists have discovered the brightest quasar in the early universe, powered by the most massive black hole yet known at that time. The international team led by astronomers from Peking…

Space disasters from Engineer Jobs: This universe, or the next, could kill us at any moment. While popular fiction is glutted with robot uprisings, zombie plagues, and apocalyptic warfare, none of our…

NASA made a major announcement today, revealing what it terms “the youngest known black hole in our cosmic neighborhood.” Photo and official text of the announcement below: Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray…

Alasdair Wilkins writes on io9.com: A leading candidate for room temperature superconductors is the copper compound cuprate, but no one knew how cuprates facilitated superconductivity … until some brave souls looked inside…

A new interactive program reveals the spectacular light show you’d see if you dared to wander close to a black hole. It demonstrates how the extreme gravity of a black hole could appear to shred background constellations of stars, spinning them around as though in a giant black washing machine.

The program’s creators say it could be an excellent tool to familiarise people with the weird ways that black holes warp light. “It’s useful for people to play around with the parameters to study how, for instance, a black hole would distort the constellation Orion,” says Thomas Müller of the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

Popular Science reports on scientists messing around with something that could cause the end of the world: pocket-sized laboratory-made black holes. Unlike a regular black hole, which traps light using the gravitational…

Betsy Mason reports in Wired: New X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory added to an image previously captured by the Hubble Space Telescope created this amazing composite image of two black holes…